Elephant Magazine. Issue 27, Summer 2016: p. 36, illustrated. BEE SCULPTURES AND PSYCHEDELIC LANDSCAPES: A DAY AT JACK SHAINMAN’S UPSTATE VENTURE, THE SCHOOL BY Robin Scher POSTED 05/25/16 1:47 PM Jack Shainman: The School. COURTESY JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY “I feel so blessed to be able to do this each year,” said gallerist Jack Shainman this past Sunday, during a tour of The School, his 30,000 square-foot exhibition space inside a former high school in Kinderhook, New York. The scattering of press followed Shainman as he led us into the building for a trip around this summer’s assemblage of art, “A Change of Place,” the third seasonal show to grace the gallery’s upstate annex since its founding in 2014. Glass enclosures housing honeycomb-encrusted metallic shapes occupy the school’s foyer. These so-called “apisculptures” are the work of Garnett Puett, a beekeeper with 2000 active hives in Hawaii. “I’m four generations into beekeeping so it comes naturally to me, working with the bees,” Puett said. Later, Shainman would take us to a room upstairs where Garnett had two pieces, each a “collaboration” with 30,000 bees. “They all get along in harmony, they’re all women, they never fight,” Shainman offered as reassurance. Puett coats his geometrical structures in beeswax, provides some sugar- water and a queen for the colony, and then lets nature do the rest. I asked him how he knows the bees’ work is complete. “It’s sort of like baking bread,” said Puett. “Sometimes it’s a few weeks, sometimes a month.” One of these works, a cabinet with three guns inside of it, was already half- engulfed in honeycomb after just a week. A rogue bee on the wrong side of the cabinet inspired my next question: Has your art ever killed anyone? “No,” Puett nervously laughed. Downstairs from the bees, Irish-born artist Richard Mosse’s photos were on prominent display. The first of two bodies of Mosse’s work on show is a series he completed in 2009 showing members of the US-military within the former palaces of deposed Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein. “I’m starting to feel like I’m in Charlie and the Chocolate factory,” said Shainman, continuing to lead the tour with a spirited step as we whizzed past these images, stopping briefly to admire another wall of portraits by Malian photographer Malick Sidibe, before making our way down to a large atrium, which formerly housed the school’s gymnasium. Installation view of Richard Mosse’s “Everything Merges With the Night”, 2015. COURTESY JACK SHAINMAN GALLERY A massive photograph of a sprawling valley in the Eastern Congo region takes up most of the atrium’s back wall. Masked in psychedelic hues of pink, Mosse created this image along with the rest in the series, titled “Infra,” with Kodak Aerochrome, a discontinued infrared film used by the military for reconnaissance missions. Mosse explained his use of the film as an attempt to capture something “otherworldly.” In this instance, the history of violence baked into the land after decades of political turmoil and outbreaks of the Ebola virus. “You can’t see the traces of it,” said Mosse. “So it’s really about the topography but [the image] also highlights the shortcomings of the camera and my frustration with myself.” In a later conversation with Mosse, he told me more about his experience taking the work back to the Congo last year as part of the Salaam Kivu International Film Festival. “It was a completely different set of value judgements to what we’d been used to in the West,” said Mosse, recalling the reactions. “A lot of people also were very unsatisfied because it didn’t show a positive side to the Congo and [they] wanted to know why the fuck I did them.” This seemed like a fair question to ask.“That’s the thing about my work,” he said,“it’s got a vague purpose but it’s not trying to spoon feed you information. It’s about asking questions rather than answering them.” The final stop on the tour found us facing paintings commissioned specifically for the space by Canadian artist Pierre Dorion. In lieu of any actual physical descriptions of The School, I’ll defer to Dorion’s paintings, which the artist himself described to us as being in “dialogue” with their surroundings, “not only pictorially, but in terms of mood, atmosphere, colors, and everything.” ART WORLD The Week in Art: The Frick Garden Party and ArtsConnection Honors Lena Dunham Sarah Cascone, Saturday, May 28, 2016 Celebration for "A Change of Place" at Jack Shainman the School Jack Shainman welcomed the public to his 30,000-square-foot Kinderhook, New York, outpost on May 22. "A Change of Place" is the sixth show in the space, which opened in a converted high school in 2014. The exhibition offers solo shows from four artists: Richard Mosse, who shoots pinked-hued photos with Kodak's discontinued infrared Aerochrome film; Garnett Puett, who enlists bees to complete his sculptures; Hayv Kahraman, who draws on 13th-century Baghdadi illuminated manuscripts for inspiration in her paintings on linen; and Pierre Dorion, who creates illusionistic painting based on photographs of the School. On hand for the occasion were guests including the Glenn Lowry, director of New York's Museum of Modern Art; JiaJia Fei, the director of digital of New York's Jewish Museum; collectors Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu; and artists Barkley L. Hendricks, Brad Kahlhamer, and Hank Willis Thomas. Work by Richard Mosse at Jack Shainman: the School opening celebration for "A Change of Place: Four Solo Exhibitions." Courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery/ BFA, Zach Hilty. Luxury Foosball, a Spicy Cocktail, and a Revised Carry-On From Armani By ALEX TUDELA MAY 5, 2016 Credit Jeremy Lawson Field Trips Kinderhook Calls It seems almost unnatural, to go to school when the weather heats up, but the Jack Shainman Gallery, which has two locations in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, hopes you will consider the idea. The gallery’s far-flung annex, in a large brick public-school building constructed in 1929, in Kinderhook, N.Y., will kick off its new season this month with a show called “A Change of Place: Four Solo Exhibitions.” The featured artists are the photographer Richard Mosse, the sculptor Garnett Puett and the painters Pierre Dorion and Hayv Kahraman. On May 22, the day of the opening, the gallery will provide round-trip transportation by bus, leaving from 513 West 20th Street. Reserve your seat early. “A Change of Place: Four Solo Exhibitions,” from May 22, at Jack Shainman Gallery: The School, 25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, N.Y. Weekend Edition: 7 Things To Do in New York’s Art World Before May 23 By Ryan Steadman • 05/19/16 4:00pm SUNDAY, MAY 22 A sampling of the four artists that will be on view at The School in Kinderhook, NY. Photo: Courtesy of Jack Shainman Opening: A celebration for “A Change of Place: Four Solo Exhibitions” at The School In honor of two fine years in existence, Chelsea dealer Jack Shainman’s 30,000-square-foot brain baby known as The School will host a Sunday celebration, complete with food, drink and plenty of adorable artists. You’ll also be able to see four very interesting shows in this renovated Kinderhook, N.Y. schoolhouse from artists Pierre Dorion, Hayv Kahraman, Richard Mosse and Garnett Puett. And the best part? Admission is free and the event is open to the public! I can’t think of a better way to spend a Sunday, can you? The School, 25 Broad Street, Kinderhook, New York, 2-6 p.m. FASHION ALTERING SPACE AND FORMING PLACE AT THE SCHOOL By HALEY WEISS Published 05/23/16 Initiating a dialogue between four artists of diverting origins and mediums, "A Change of Place: Four Solo Exhibitions" opened yesterday at Jack Shainman Gallery's The School, a converted schoolhouse two hours outside of Manhattan in Kinderhook, New York. With works ranging from Pierre Dorion's quietly evocative, minimalist site-specific paintings to Richard Mosse's surreal infrared photographs of the Democratic Republic of Congo's scarred landscape, the four-fold show covers vast territory, but its atmosphere remains constant: introspective, unselfish, and challenging. To call the practice of each included artist (Dorion and Mosse, plus Hayv Kahraman and Garnett Puett) unique would be accurate, albeit an oversimplification. As a painter keenly aware of formalism, Dorion has created works based on the exhibition spaces in which he shows for the last 10 years. After photographing the space, he reconstructs each image with his brush and a canvas, intimating how space forms experience. Through sculpture, audio, and painting, Hayv Kahraman elicits her experience as a refugee who fled Iraq as a child. Her recent paintings— perhaps most aptly classified as sonic shields—depict nude women and are delicately pierced, allowing pyramids of acoustic foam to poke through the surface, altering and absorbing the sound of the surrounding space. The results pose a formidable counterpoint to the sirens of war. Mosse's photographs also emerge from the violence of war, as he shot in Iraq during its occupation by the United States military, as well as among sectarian violence in the Congo for the last five years. For Garnett Puett, a beekeeper by trade, the show marks a return to the art world and an opportunity to revisit his "apisculptures," sculptural armatures upon which bees have worked, forming their signature geometric comb. Puett also allows bees to enter and exit beehives inside the gallery through holes in the wall (he will technically be working throughout the show's duration).